Abstract

INTRODUCTION Pollution and Toxicity Cultivating Ecological Practices for Troubled Times Josh Fisher, Mary Mostafanezhad, Alex Nading, and Sarah Marie Wiebe Plastic bags ride the currents of the Pacifi c Ocean and collect in the Mariana Trench; stockpiles of nuclear waste are pumped deep into Earth’s outer crust; smoke and smog (a fusion of par- ticulate matter and ozone) settle in above sprawling urban colonies, slowly killing their deni- zens; spent oxygen canisters join “forever chemicals” on the snows of Everest; and billions of pieces of space debris endlessly fall in Low Earth Orbit, just beyond a thin and rapidly changing breathable atmosphere. So goes the narrative of the Anthropocene, a purportedly new geologi- cal epoch demarcated by the planetary eff ects of human activity. Th e symbolic anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966) understood pollution as “matter out of place,” a kind of disorder that necessarily prompts eff orts to “organize” the environment. Anthropologists, geographers, and other social scientists have since pushed the conversation forward by inquiring into the materiality of pollution, the toxicity that manifests in situated encounters between bodies and environments, and the co-production of pollution/toxicity— two sides of the same coin, one overfl owing boundaries and the other